Localizing Knowledge in a Globalizing World


Book Description

The essays in this collection address the current crisis in area studies, a crisis that differs from its perennial struggle with the established academic disciplines. This crisis stems from the confluence of three related circumstances: the end of the Cold War; greater economic and cultural fluidity across political borders; and contradictory intellectual trends in the academy, which include on the one hand a renaissance of universalizing thinking in the social sciences and on the other .hand, the rise of post-colonial studies and debates about modernity, postmodernity, and cultural hybridization. Although the essays differ markedly in their focus and strategies, the authors all demonstrate that local knowledge, including serious study of individual cultures and proficiency in foreign languages, which are vital to understanding rapidly changing global patterns and to countering universal claims by the social sciences. While the authors also agree that area studies must reject their enthnocentric heritages and adopt inventive new contours, they present a diversity




A Practical Guide to Localization


Book Description

Translation technology has evolved quickly with a large number of translation tools available. In this revised addition, much content has been added about translating and engineering HTML and XML documents, multilingual web sites, and HTML-based online help systems. Other major changes include the addition of chapters on internationalizatoi, software quailty assurance, descktop publishing and localization supprort. There is a focus on translators who want to learn about localization ad translation technology.




Localizing Global English


Book Description

English is the most widely taught and learned language in the world and is used for communication among speakers from different language backgrounds. How it can be effectively taught and learned, what English means to, and how it can be "owned" by, non-native speakers of English in Asia and elsewhere, are all issues that warrant contemplation. This edited collection addresses these issues and more by looking at a wide range of topics that are relevant and timely in contexts where English is taught as a foreign language. The authors offer novel perspectives gleaned from theory and actual practice that can inform English language teaching in Asia and beyond. This book will be of interest to researchers, policymakers, curriculum developers, and practitioners in the field of English teaching and learning.




From Global to Local


Book Description

This brilliantly original book dismantles the underlying assumptions that drive the decisions made by companies and governments throughout the world, to show that our shared narrative of the global economy is deeply flawed. If left unexamined, they will lead corporations and countries astray, with dire consequences for us all. For the past fifty years or so, the global economy has been run on three big assumptions: that globalization will continue to spread, that trade is the engine of growth and development, and that economic power is moving from the West to the East. More recently, it has also been taken as a given that our interconnectedness—both physical and digital—will increase without limit. But what if all these ideas are wrong? What if everything is about to change? What if it has already begun to change but we just haven't noticed? Increased automation, the advent of additive manufacturing (3D printing, for example), and changes in shipping and environmental pressures, among other factors, are coming together to create a fast-changing global economic landscape in which the rules are being rewritten—at once a challenge and an opportunity for companies and countries alike.




The Localization Reader


Book Description

Readings that point the way to a peaceful, democratic, and ecologically resilient transition to an era of localization, limits, and societal opportunities. Energy supplies are tightening. Persistent pollutants are accumulating. Food security is declining. There is no going back to the days of reckless consumption, but there is a possibility—already being realized in communities across North America and around the world—of localizing, of living well as we learn to live well within immutable constraints. This book maps the transition to a more localized world. Society is shifting from the centrifugal forces of globalization (cheap and abundant raw materials and energy, intensive commercialization, concentrated economic and political power) to the centripetal forces of localization: distributed authority and leadership, sustainable use of nearby natural resources, community self-reliance and cohesion (with crucial regional, national, and international dimensions). This collection, offering classic texts by such writers as Wendell Berry, M. King Hubbert, and Ernst F. Schumacher, as well as new work by authors including Karen Litfin and David Hess, shows how localization—a process of affirmative social change—can enable psychologically meaningful and fulfilling lives while promoting ecological and social sustainability. Topics range from energy dynamics to philosophies of limits, from the governance of place-based communities to the discovery of positive personal engagement. Together they point the way to a transition that can be peaceful, democratic, just, and environmentally resilient.







Language Policy and Planning in Universities


Book Description

In a world where higher education is increasingly internationalised, questions of language use and multilingualism are central to the ways in which universities function in teaching, research and administration. Contemporary universities find themselves in complex linguistic environments that may include national level language policies, local linguistic diversity, an internationalised student body, increasing international collaboration in research, and increased demand for the use and learning of international languages, especially English. The book presents a critical analysis of how universities are responding these complexities in different contexts around the world. The contributions show that language issues in universities are complex and often contested as universities try to negotiate the national and the international in their work. In some contexts, universities’ language policies and the ways in which they are implemented may have a negative impact on their ways of working. In other contexts, however, universities have embraced multilingualism in ways that have opened up new academic possibilities for staff and students. Collectively, the chapters show that universities’ language policy and planning are a work in progress and that much further work is needed for universities to achieve their language goals. This book was originally published as a special issue of Current Issues in Language Planning.




Cold War Social Science


Book Description

This book explores how the social sciences became entangled with the global Cold War. While duly recognizing the realities of nation states, national power, and national aspirations, the studies gathered here open up new lines of transnational investigation. Considering developments in a wide array of fields – anthropology, development studies, economics, education, political science, psychology, science studies, and sociology – that involved the movement of people, projects, funding, and ideas across diverse national contexts, this volume pushes scholars to rethink certain fundamental points about how we should understand – and thus how we should study – Cold War social science itself.




Sense of Place and Sense of Planet


Book Description

Sense of Place and Sense of Planet analyzes the relationship between the imagination of the global and the ethical commitment to the local in environmentalist thought and writing from the 1960s to the present. Part One critically examines the emphasis on local identities and communities in North American environmentalism by establishing conceptual connections between environmentalism and ecocriticism, on one hand, and theories of globalization, transnationalism and cosmopolitanism, on the other. It proposes the concept of "eco-cosmopolitanism" as a shorthand for envisioning these connections and the cultural and aesthetic forms into which they translate. Part Two focuses on conceptualizations of environmental danger and connects environmentalist and ecocritical thought with the interdisciplinary field of risk theory in the social sciences, arguing that environmental justice theory and ecocriticism stand to benefit from closer consideration of the theories of cosmopolitanism that have arisen in this field from the analysis of transnational communities at risk. Both parts of the book combine in-depth theoretical discussion with detailed analyses of novels, poems, films, computer software and installation artworks from the US and abroad that translate new connections between global, national and local forms of awareness into innovative aesthetic forms combining allegory, epic, and views of the planet as a whole with modernist and postmodernist strategies of fragmentation, montage, collage, and zooming.




The Routledge Handbook of Anthropology and Global Health


Book Description

The Routledge Handbook of Anthropology and Global Health provides an overview of the complex relationship between anthropology and global health. The book brings together a diverse group of scholars who consider the intersection of anthropological concerns with health and disease as understood and intervened upon by the field of global health. The book is structured around five sections: (1) social, cultural, and political determinants of health; (2) knowledge production in anthropology and global health; (3) persistent invisibilities in global health; (4) reimagining a critical global health; and (5) new horizons in anthropology and global health. Over these five themes a range of topics is explored, including: rare diseases medical pluralism universal global health protocols HIV health security indigenous communities (non)communicable diseases decolonizing global health The Routledge Handbook of Anthropology and Global Health is an essential resource for upper-level students and researchers in anthropology, global health, sociology, international development, health studies, and politics.